Marc Danziger at Winds of Change says he may have found Jamil Hussein working at the Yarmouk police station:
With the help of some friends who have been doing a smidgen of looking, and it appears – appears, but is not certain – that there is in fact a Jamail Hussein in the Yarmouk police station in Baghdad. We’ll know more tomorrow.
You will notice that the first name is spelled differently which would not jive with the AP’s own reporting:
The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.
Additionally the AP has written that he is not working at Yarmouk anymore but at al-Khadra:
He has been based at the police station at Yarmouk, and more recently at al-Khadra, another Baghdad district, and has been interviewed by the AP several times at his office and by telephone. His full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein.
So that’s two strikes to this story. We shall see if we get a third strike after we get a response from Centcom and the Iraqi MoI.
Additionally I would like to add that I have always said there may indeed be a Jamil Hussein (check out my many posts on Jamil Hussein here), but that he has been proven to be a fraud. If Mr. Hussein is indeed found he will have to be verified by the MoI.
As for the Burning Story we have to remember all the evidence that exists that this never happened:
- 3 unnamed witnesses, 1 named witness who recanted, and 1 police officer who is a fraud
- No bodies
- No evidence of any charred clothing at the scene, nor any other evidence that human beings were burnt
- The fact that only 2 pints of kerosene per person was supposedly used to burn these people
- The fact that no family members of the supposed dead have been found nor the identities of the dead themselves
- The fact that the first story stated 4 mosques were burnt, when in fact only one was slightly:
Contrary to recent media reporting that four mosques were burned in Hurriya, an Iraqi Army patrol investigating the area found only one mosque had been burned in the neighborhood.
- The fact that the AP reported they had verified this story by hospital workers:
AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and neighborhood residents and corroborated it with a named police spokesmen and also through hospital and morgue workers.
but later say that witnesses claimed the bodies were IMMEDIATELY buried:
One witness said he and other people from the neighborhood took the six immolation victims to the Sunni cemetery near Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib suburb and buried them after the gunbattle.
- No outcry from the Sunni community (especially the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars who would have screamed bloody murder if this incident had happened) which another reporter stated was one reason he didn’t believe it:
We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here. Such an incident would have been so abominable that a great many of the residents in Hurriya, as well as in other Sunni Arab districts, would have been in an uproar over it. Hard-line Sunni Arab organizations such as the Muslim Scholars Association or the Iraqi Islamic Party would almost certainly have appeared on television that day or the next to denounce this specific incident. Iraqi clerics and politicians are not shy about doing this. Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident. So I mentioned it only in passing in my report.
- Neither Al-Jazeera, nor Reuters or the UPI have been able to verify this burning nor did they report on this event. Only the AP
All of this adds up to a fraudulent story.
UPDATE
SeeDubya also found another article by the AP which shows that Jamil Hussein gave bad information last June:
According to Capt. Hussein of the al-Yarmouk police station, gunmen opened fire on a minibus in Dora’s predominantly Sunni Arab Mahdiya neighborhood. He said 11 people were killed, but Al-Yarmouk hospital reported receiving only two bodies from a shooting. It was unclear if the victims were Sunni or Shiite. There was no one available at Baghdad’s main morgue to confirm if it had received any bodies.
SeeDubya asks:
So once again, Ms. Carroll and the AP: Who is Jamil Hussein? How does he know the things he says he knows, why does he tell them to you (at great risk to his own career), and why should we trust him?
He has also found another Jamil Hussein working in a hospital in the Yarmouk district which would seem to mean that the name is quite common.
UPDATE II
Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project also has some questions for the AP:
Here’s some of the questions that need to be answered:
1. At which mosque did the incident occur? Are there damages consistent with the incident?
2. Is there photographic evidence of the immolations, or the burn-marks on the ground?
3. Where are the bodies? What are their names?
4. Why has no Sunni imams or Iraqi authorities vouched for the incident?
5. What are the names of any “witnesses”? Are they credible?
6. Who is Jamil, or Jamail, Hussein? Is he a knowledgeable policeman? If a policeman, though located far from the scene, how would he know what happened, especially when others nearby don’t? What are his affiliations?
7. What are the qualifications of the AP reporter who sources Jamil? How does AP verify his reporting?
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